Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is the eleventh entry in Ubisoft’s popular Assassin’s Creed franchise, following the release of last year’s Assassin’s Creed Origins. While the series has flirted with the historic epic genre since its incarnation, having settings during the French Revolution, the Third Crusades, and even during the Age of Piracy, Odyssey is the first title to embrace the sword and sandal genre, specifically drawing influence from contemporary neo-peplum films such as Gladiator and 300.

Odyssey takes place in 341 BCE during the Peloponnesian War, and in a break with predecessor titles, the game allows the option of selecting which character to play as: Kassandra or Alexios. The plot is exactly the same regardless of choice, but having the option to select a female protagonist is a milestone leap for the genre. Not since Xena of the '90s has a female heroine of pepla been so fleshed out and commanded center stage in a narrative. Odyssey sees Kassandra (or Alexios), a descendant of Leonidas (of 300 fame), trek across the various lands and islands of the Aegean Sea, searching for her parents and trying to outwit and overthrow the Cult of Kosmos, a shadowy cabal that controls the Greek world from behind the scenes. During her quest, Kassandra crosses paths with many important characters of antiquity (Pythagoras, Pericles, and even Socrates to name a few), competes in the Olympics, and even fights a few mythical creatures such as the minotaur and Medusa.

As with previous titles, stealth is the focus of Odyssey, with emphasis on Kassandra sneaking into fortifications/caves/ruins, hiding in bushes, or danging from the edge of walls, and leaping out to stab the oblivious Spartan/Athenian/bandit. If spotted, the gameplay shifts to a standard combat mode, where the player can chain attacks together, parry, or even execute special moves (provided Kassandra has enough adrenaline available). As Kassandra fights, she’ll gain experience and level up which will unlock points she can use to purchase new abilities in her skill trees (hunting, warrior, assassin). These includes abilities such as lighting your weapon on fire or turning invisible.

The game sees the return of a nautical element by having Kassandra command a ship, the Adrestia, early in the story. In the beginning, she uses the ship to combat pirates and other enemies by ramming them, firing arrows, or even boarding them, as well as traversing between the different islands and ports in the Aegean. It’s quite exhilarating as she commands the ship to speed up, looking right down the deck, as the waves whip past; however, much later in the game, as the player opens up more and more synchronization points to fast travel to, the need to take to the seas is greatly diminished. Despite this, the Adrestia’s captain, Barnabas, is easily the greatest character in the game. He is hilarious, and the voice actor nails his enthusiasm.

Odyssey sees the addition of a new gameplay element: conquest battles. As Kassandra journeys across the Grecian lands, she can engage in activities to weaken an occupying faction (Sparta or Athens) by assassinating high-ranking officials, looting a treasury, or burning supplies. When a nation is weakened by these actions, the option to do a conquest battle becomes available, and Kassandra can either pick to fight for Sparta or for Athens in a giant land skirmish comprised of dozens and dozens of soldiers. The outcome of the battles can flip which force occupies the land while rewarding Kassandra with loot.

There’s a plethora of side quests, as well. There are tombs to be raided, sunken ships to be explored, bounties to collect, animals to hunt, and so on. There is a romantic component to the game, as well; however, it's fairly superficial when compared to other games, such as the Mass Effect series. Kassandra can romance a variety of NPCs (male and female), but most of these encounters are either one-night stands for side quests with only a few instances of a wooed person joining her crew on the Adrestia. There’s no real emotional connection or investment for those recruited this way; once they join your crew, they become silent characters either standing on the deck or on reserve.

Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is a standout game, not just in the Assassin’s Creed series, but in present-day gaming, as well as the peplum genre. What Gladiator did to rejuvenate the sword and sandal genre for cinema Odyssey does for video games. The ability to play as Kassandra is also a tremendous step for both the peplum genre and the video game medium, creating a new female protagonist that ranks up there with other icons such as Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft, Bayonetta, and Metroid’s Samus. Odyssey is both a transgressive game in this regard, as well as a finely executed one. The gameplay is fun and varied; at any time, the player can stray from the main story to engage in what the world has to offer (which is a lot), and Ubisoft is currently providing continuous updates to the title by way of new quests. After Origins and Odyssey, it will be exciting to see if the series will continue to explore stories set in antiquity.

Escape rooms are an interesting concept and translating the experience to a home version can be difficult, but Apocalypse by Argyx Games manages to pull it off with some interesting twists.

When the game is complete, it will be a series of installments where players must solve clues to stop a serial killer. The test version is a prelude to demonstrate the type of puzzles in the actual game, which will be far more in-depth.

What stands out as different with this game (as opposed to the traditional escape room experience) is that not only are computers and phones allowed—they are necessary. Before you begin the game, you are instructed to visit a website that plays atmospheric music to set the tone and has a clock to track your progress, as well as links for hints when you need help. The game is unique in how it combines a tactile experience with a virtual one by using physical props to point you to websites and online videos. This is interesting, although, there were big chunks of the game spent just searching around the internet for clues. From the photos of the full game, it is clear that there will be many more physical pieces, so this should not be a problem in the actual release.

Despite only having the trial version, the game was very difficult. All of us who played were experienced at escape rooms, and we found it tough. I feel I must mention that one of the reasons it was so difficult was that one of the props was not included in the set. We only discovered that it was absent after getting stuck and looking up hints. By that point, we were too far into the game to do anything about it, but, hopefully, the final version will include a list of contents with the box.

The full version should be available soon, but, for now, you can support the Kickstarter.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, 25 games after the original Resident Evil’s release in 1996, has returned to form. While the recent Resident Evil games have played on ideas of action and shooter-based horror, Resident Evil 7 is once again focused on the original genre of Resident Evil: survival horror.

As the basis for the survival horror genre in gaming, the Resident Evil franchise has carried high expectations. In the first game, the player was required to choose to play as one or the other of two available characters: Jill Valentine or Chris Redfield. The game limited ammo, and set the character down narrow and restrictive hallways with fixed camera angles and no way to scout around corners or step back from opening doors. The game’s ultimate prize was getting out alive: surviving the mansion and its undead inhabitants.

The later games moved to empower the player more within the space. While games maintained their focus on Umbrella and their bio-organic weapons, the worlds opened up and provided more space and a greater sense of control. Games could include more checklists of tasks, or were on-rails shooters. While Resident Evil: Revelations narrowed the space of play and Resident Evil 4 used a close, over-the-shoulder camera movement to invoke a greater sense of limitation and enclosure, the movement in Resident Evil 5 and 6 was more into action-gaming and dramatic horror and less in the sense of desperation and survival. The characters were powerful in the face of the threats, instead of the feeling of near helplessness in the original game.

Other game franchises, like Silent Hill, also took up the mantle of survival horror and helped build the genre into greater popularity. Just as Resident Evil led to numerous games and a movie series, Silent Hill spawned a dozen games for different platforms and two film adaptations. Most notable is the recent promise of a new game, Silent Hills, which was teased with the Playstation’s 4’s P.T., or playable teaser. The project was set to bring Guillermo del Torro together with Hideo Kojima, and starred Norman Redus. The game-play was first-person, in a small, cramped house space, as the player was caught in a loop, moving through the same hallway over and over with minor changes happening each time, revealing more about the horror of the space. When the project was cancelled in 2015, there was an internet outcry at the loss of such an appealing game-space.

The reaction to P.T. demonstrated the craving for this genre in gaming. P.T. was released on August 12th, 2014, and by September 1st, 2014, had been downloaded over 1 million times,1 and viewed online many millions more than that. The trailer was an effective tool of viral marketing and appealed to a market that enjoyed the jump-scare horror of Dead Space2 and the ominous threats of Alien: Isolation3 or Amnesia: Dark Descent.4

Resident Evil 7, while a different studio and different series, has captured aspects of what made P.T. so enthralling, as the game has benefited from a recent invigoration of interest in the survival horror. Echoing the first-person camera, the close hallways, and the subtle, off-camera audio cuing, Resident Evil 7 really appears at first a successor to P.T. more than it does a sequel to Resident Evil 6. The important aspects of survival horror have been lost in recent Resident Evil games, as the characters have become too powerful for the threat they face to feel truly overwhelming.

Resident Evil 7: Biohazard has recaptured that sense of desperation, as the player is not a highly trained S.T.A.R.S. operative, police officer, or even a skilled fighter. The player is situated in the avatar-body of Ethan Winters, a regular civilian trying to find his missing wife. He lost contact with her three years before and is prompted to visit a derelict home in Louisiana after getting the location from an email sent, ostensibly, from Mia. Immediately, the sense of desperation and near helplessness is established with that premise. Ethan is clinging to hope, willing to go to any distance or extreme to recover his wife. This positioning of the task as one of love, of personal significance, means that the player facing the threats of horror space is not a job or choice. The motivation already sets apart the experience and invests the player in the space.

From the outset, the space has to borrow a phrase from Diana Wynne Jones, a “reek of wrongness.”5 The player is prepared for the dilapidation and threat, as she is playing a Resident Evil game. The game, after setting up the mysterious and dark nature of the story with two video clips of Mia, has the player drive up to the entrance of the Baker Ranch in Dulvey, Louisiana. Ethan leaves the car and walks to the front gate, which he finds locked, and needs to circle around back to access the house. After going through the broken patch of gate and circling around, the player sees someone walking up ahead, crossing her path. No matter how quickly she runs, she will not catch another glimpse of that figure, as it disappears ahead of her. The walk to the house sets up the sense of discomfort, as the player walks under animal parts strung up in a talismanic net over the path and past the charred remains of Ethan’s wife’s belongings. The isolation and threat are built up before the player enters the house, creating the craving to turn back and the moment’s hesitation before facing what is an ominous space.

The settings get darker and more discomforting as the game goes on, as the main house is corrupted with mold growths that infest the space and peel off the walls and floors in animated, anthropomorphic toothy monsters. The house, and its rot, literally attacks Ethan. The world around the player is oppressive, powerful, and threatening.

The tonal horror of the space is more effective than previous games, as the powerlessness of the avatar is highlighted. As the avatar is an everyman, he has no special skills or tools at the beginning of the game. He cannot open a padlock at the front gate and must go around. At the start of the game, the only action Ethan can perform, other than walking, is to shield himself with his bare hands, an almost pitiful gesture. Going into the game unarmed heightens the player’s discomfort, as she doesn’t know what she will be facing. The game plays with this sense of the unexpected, as the player sees someone walking up ahead when she goes around the house. So, while the guesthouse the player explores appears empty, there is threat of the unknown, a threat of the unseen.

Limiting the player’s view by setting the game in a first-person view heightens this sense of threats just out of view. The first game to restrict player-perspective to a first-person view, Resident Evil 7 uses the limited view to bring the player into the small spaces and tight, confining passages to create a properly claustrophobic experience. The player moves right up to doors to open them, needs to swivel back and forth when entering a room or hallway and must turn fully around to survey the room. These movements are slower than a camera-swivel, as a quick pan of the room is not as easy as most shooters’ mechanics. It echoes the limited camera-movement found in Resident Evil 4, where the player could ‘shoulder check’ in-game, rather than panning the camera. The restriction of visible range meant the audio-cues off-screen required an avatar-movement, not just a quick camera-scan, which Resident Evil 7 echoes.

The gradual granting of tools and weapons builds the player’s anxiety. Previous games have the player engaging with the world as a trained operative: a powerful person facing a dangerous threat. In Resident Evil 7, the player lacks that power. He is a man seeking his lost love, so he doesn’t come with a gun, a tactical knife, or a lot of cargo-pockets. He has nothing, and must scrounge for everything he uses. The player can gradually discover lock-picks, pieces of the various puzzles, weapons, ammo and medical treatments; however, the inventory space is only eight slots plus four quick-draw items. This fills quickly, as puzzles to unlock doors can be three or four pieces, taking up three or four inventory slots in the process. This can inhibit the player’s ability to pick up health, ammo, or even critical weapons in a combat situation. This limitation of tools and space is a simple way that the game can heighten tension and create the sensation of physical limitation in the game-space.

The survival element of the survival horror also builds the anxiety of the game. While many games have a death-component, the slow-build of death and the lack of precise health-bar makes the experience of combat a more clear threat. The player’s vision will be obscured by blood-spatter around the edges of the screen, with the blood becoming more pronounced as Ethan is more injured. He also wears a monitor on his wrist, which tracks his heartbeat in green, yellow, and red depending on his relative health. The inexact nature of the health tracking means the player can’t gauge the number of hits Ethan can face. Instead, death is constantly a threat, an ever-possible eventuality that hangs over the player’s exploration. There are dramatic scenes of dismemberment, in which Ethan loses limbs, but there are ways of repairing and fixing that grievous bodily harm. Ethan does not die easily or quickly, but struggles against that, making death sequences both drawn out and horrific. Death in itself in video games is not inherently frightening: Mario dies frequently, but there is no fear in that. Death in the game is a sword of Damocles; the threat of death and its near presence is far worse than dying quickly or frequently. Instead, Ethan’s survival despite impossible injury adds to the horrific elements of the game.

The first person you meet in the house is the focus of the game’s goal: Mia. She is locked in a cell below the guesthouse and Ethan is able to free her, but with the immediate discovery that she is not completely the woman she was. She has lost track of time, doesn’t remember sending the email, and is disoriented when leaving her cell. These sorts of mental disruptions are understandable for someone under forced confinement, but very soon after letting her out, the player sees another change in Mia: She crawls up the basement stairs before her face snaps up and fills the field of view. The scene is wordless: She snarls and rasps, before throwing Ethan across the hall and attacking him with a knife. The lack of weapon or meaningful way of fighting back makes this exchange overwhelming; the player can only press a button to “resist.” Mia’s eyes clear, and she returns to herself again, before knocking herself out against the wall; Ethan asks the question every player is asking: “What the fuck are you, Mia?”

The game plays on the emotional investment of Ethan and the horror film tropes of the abandoned house and the unknown threat. Mia is the initial goal, but she is also the first antagonist. She is the first jump-scare of the game, lunging out with a screwdriver to pin Ethan’s hand to the wall before cutting through his arm with a chainsaw. The brutality of her actions are shocking, and the first truly gory exchange in the game; Ethan fights off her knife attacks, uses an axe to defend himself and then attempt to kill her, and then loses his arm to her chainsaw attack. Their final face-off is between Ethan armed with a gun and Mia with a chainsaw. The fight is bloody and hard-fought and ends with Ethan killing Mia. She is at once familiar and foreign, friendly and horrific: as Ethan’s wife and the set-up at the beginning of the game, she is established as the emotional driver of the game. Yet, her revelation as the first monster and first threat disrupts that emotional tie. The player, as Ethan, is forced to kill the person he sought to save. The desperation of the act at the end of the first game sequence enforces the sense of hopelessness and the price of survival.

The game’s genre of survival horror focuses on just that: survival and horror. To survive, Ethan must kill his wife, must escape the Baker family, and must kill a child. All these acts and scenarios are horrific, challenging the player who is embodied in the avatar. Through the game’s visual framing, inventory limitations, character spaces, and slow-story reveal, the game creates an immersive and effective horror story that the player must fight to survive.

Footnotes 1. See IGN article “Playstation 4’s PT Silent Hills Demo Downloaded 1+ Million Times,” dated 1 September, 2014.2. A game series set in an adrift mining spaceship where the player controls Isaac Clarke in his fight against Necromorphs: alien creatures that consume and corrupt thel ife forms on the ship. While described as survival horror, Dead Space and Dead Space 2 are much more action-shooter, however the ship-exploration provide an atmosphere of horror and anticipation.3. A game with a single protagonist and a single alien, Alien Isolation is a survival and stealth-based game with provides the player with weapons, but limits the ammo and focuses more on escape and concealment than fighting.4. A first-person exploration of a castle to solve the puzzles and unlock the character’s memory. The game is truly a survival game in that the player has no weapons or way or defending herself: she can only solve puzzles and avoid the threats.5. Wynne Jones, Diana. The Tough Guide to Fantasy Land. London: Gollancz, 1996. 167.

Mobile games are one of the fastest growing forms of entertainment in today's gaming marketplace. Most people have smartphones, using them to check the internet, social media, and spend a few minutes at a time playing a game to keep them occupied. Comic books and their related media are also one of the biggest pieces of the entertainment marketplace, and their entry into the world of mobile gaming has been not only extremely popular, but with the introduction of micro-transactions, incredibly lucrative.

That brings us to DC Legends. It's a relatively new game, and because of that, it's significantly behind in many areas when compared to other games on the market. Games such as Marvel's Future Fight or Avengers Academy, games in the Star Wars universe, and many other have large followings and dedicated players willing to devote massive amounts of time to their respective games. While DC doesn't have that just yet, this foray into this gaming space is a good start.

DC Legends takes all of the beloved characters from their vast catalog and wraps it around a well-known story - that of Blackest Night, a storyline that took the members of DC Comics and put them on a collision course with Death itself. This focuses on the fight with Nekron, a terrifying villain. As you continue through the levels, you gain experience, level up gear, and gain access to more and more of the game's roster of heroes and villains.

It's pretty straightforward: Take on a few foes, get better, build up your characters, get a few more, and play some PvP, pitting your roster against players from all over the world. It's a good formula for a mobile game, and one that allows for hours of entertainment as you have to get stronger and stronger to get further into the game. Each mission has a reward, with everything from in-game currency and experience tokens to level-up fragments to continue to improve your characters.

While the base of the game is solid and very entertaining, there's still a lot of room to grow. Because it's new, it's still pretty bare-bones. The main menu of the game depicts this very obviously, with several stages in the game under a “Coming Soon” banner. With that, there are various mission types to keep things interesting, with story missions depicting the fight against Nekron, a heroic mission section to gain powerups for your heroes, and a timed daily mission to gain more experience for your fighters. The PvP mode puts you in a group of similar players, giving points towards a weekly goal for beating their team in battle with yours. The rewards put you in ever-competitive tiers, each with a greater reward and more challenge.

The mission modes are much like many others, but there are a few drawbacks. The energy costs for these types of missions are generally pretty low in games so that players can feel like they're accomplishing things while playing. But here, the cost of mission vs. energy generation are pretty steep, so after only a few missions, you're out of energy and have to wait a long period of time to do it all over again for only a few minutes. That is a huge detractor for continued use. If I can only play for five minutes and then have to wait for two hours before I can really play again, why even bother?

After playing the game since just after launch, I can say that it's solid, but needs room to grow. The mission systems are simplistic, the PvP system is decent but could use some refinement, and the biggest issue with the game is actually the micro-transactions and shop portions of the game. As you get stronger, the challenge grows at a scale that is hard to maintain without some help from the marketplace. The issue with that is that there is really no good way to do that without putting in a large amount of money. The options for in-game purchases are significant and don't feel like they offer enough to really do anything of use. There are special deals and changing options, but mostly, they all cost too much for not benefiting the player enough. If these prices were to come down or if they were to offer some more interesting options, it might be better suited for casual players.

That's where it stands with this game. It's fun, but too new to really make it stand out from the crowd. A weak shopping system really detracts from the game, and with energy costs high, it's a lot of money to keep playing for any significant amount of time. I think with some tweaks to the system, this could be one of the more popular games on the marketplace, but there's not enough to keep it from breaking through as it stands now.

I will leave it with this: DC Legends is a fun, if thin, mobile game. There is some major promise here, and I like it at its core, but without some major changes in the way it's designed, it likely won't keep players engaged. Fans of the DC line should really enjoy it, but I can't recommend it for casual players as it stands right now.